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The Screen Actors Guild Award nominations Wednesday morning offered plenty of confirmation of existing awards contenders -- the “Boyhood” train kept rolling, “Birdman” and “Imitation Game” saw love all around and front-runners such as Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton got the requisite calls from their agents. But there were also names we didn’t expect and movies that hadn’t tracked. Here are some of the unexpected lessons and trends from the first big guild announcement of the season. Christmas blues: Almost all of the major nominees have been out there for weeks or even months -- “Boyhood,” Birdman” and “The Grand...

Mere minutes after the curtain came down on the 72nd Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, celebrities began streaming into a post-show bash staged by Weinstein Co. and Netflix in a massive tent beside the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
Amy Adams arrived, Darren Le...

The final installment of the "Hobbit" franchise is likely to top the box office again over the four-day Christmas weekend.
"The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies" is expected to add $50 million to its current $107.9 million...

It was the most wonderful time of the year for the box office.
Though the box office total is still down about 5% from last year, three new films, the final “Hobbit” installment and limited-release awards contenders helped give the industry a much...

For "Big Eyes," director Tim Burton cast four of the biggest, widest eyes in contemporary movies. Two of them belong to Amy Adams, who plays painter Margaret Keane, creator of countless canvases of huge-orbed waifs mysteriously popular for a...

Forget martinis and femme fatales; the constant running through 50 years of James Bond movies has been Martin, Aston Martin.
The 24th installment of the spy series, called “Spectre,” features a 2015 Aston Martin DB10.
“I’m really excited and thrilled to...

It can be a fine line, and a point of much awards-season engineering, to draw the distinction between a supporting performance and a lead. For a role to be placed in the supporting category by no means diminishes its importance to a story or the challenge...

TELLURIDE, Colo. — Many sequences in Steve McQueen's new movie, "12 Years a Slave" — the true story of a free black man kidnapped in 1841 and sold to Southern plantation owners — were emotionally exhausting to film. But the British director...

CANNES, France — Visitors exiting the Carlton hotel's front door on this city's beachfront main street this week can't help but see a giant map of France with Cannes listed as being a "Safe Zone." "This Is the Safest Place to Be,"...

Summer's not yet over and Hollywood's annual awards race has already started — though you may have to hop a plane and travel several thousand miles to notice.
The Venice Film Festival opens Wednesday, to be quickly followed by two other high-profile...

Netflix has struck a deal with Weinstein Co. for the exclusive U.S. pay-television rights to the independent film studio's first-run movies, beginning in 2016.
The arrangement represents a further step in the budding Internet television service's...

Wang Jianlin is the wealthiest man in China, owns the biggest theater chain in the world and wants to create the world's largest movie studio in his home country.
Hollywood is taking the billionaire chairman of Dalian Wanda Group Corp. seriously, but...

“We’re always sitting in personal private judgment of the films we see,” Steven Spielberg said Wednesday, in Wednesday’s Cannes Film Festival press conference introducing this year’s nine-person jury headed by Spielberg.
Therefore it was time, the...

CANNES -- An incident apparently involving a gun briefly interrupted a French television interview with actors Christoph Waltz and Daniel Auteuil at the Cannes Film Festival on Friday and sent nearby pedestrians scurrying for safety.
According to several...

In a shrewd gambit to set search-engines everywhere ablaze and bring the Internet to its knees, this past weekend's episode of "Saturday Night Live" featured Miley Cyrus in a sketch parodying the film adaptation of "Fifty Shades Of...

If you say the name three times, will it appear? "Beetlejuice 2" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as easily as plain old "Beetlejuice," but momentum appears to be gaining for the movie just the same.
Tim Burton and Michael Keaton...

Sandra Bullock is going to be very busy come the end of summer.
The actress' film "Gravity" has just been chosen as the opening-night flick of the 70th Venice Film Festival, set for Aug. 28. This follows the news that the Alfonso...

Quentin Tarantino will appear as part of the tribute to actor Bruce Dern on Monday at the AFI Fest in Hollywood. Dern appeared in Tarantino's Oscar-winning "Django Unchained."
Dern has been busy this award season in support of his role in...

HOLLYWOOD — There’s the show, and there’s the show behind the show, and which involves more work or offers more entertainment is debatable.
For instance, Jared Leto’s backstage session after winning the best supporting actor Oscar for “Dallas Buyers...

"Carnage"
SBS Productions
U.S. release: Dec. 16
The premise
Ethan Longstreet (Eliot Berger), age 11, has formed a gang at his Brooklyn school but has excluded classmate Zachary Cowan (Elvis Polanski), also age 11. When Zachary confronts...